A large portion of email messages received today by users are in the form of automatically generated commercial messages, such as those sent by companies, organizations and service providers to individuals. Although some of these automated messages may include spam and random advertisements and offerings, other messages result from a user's direct interaction or affiliation with a company. For example, these messages may include the result of transactions that a user has performed with companies, such as, travel itinerary confirmation, reservation reminders, eCommerce receipts, etc. With such increases in messages related to a user's purchases and interests, additional opportunities for product and service solicitation can be created.
In the current state of the art, some email services may display advertisements in conjunction with a user's email interface similar to how advertisements are displayed next to search results provided by a search engine. GMAIL provided by GOOGLE inc., is an exemplary email service that displays advertisements in the email interface. However, these advertisements merely provide simple text-only ads with static hyperlinks that direct users to an advertiser's home webpage when selected.
Current email services lack customized advertising for facilitating follow-up transactions based on a user's current context. Thus, there exists a need to provide contextual applications for making actions available to potential clients in anticipation of a user's goal when they are in a mood or state of mind to pursue these services based on their email contexts.